VICARS SCRUB FLOORS

Greymouth Evening Star, 6 January 1934, Page 8

VICARS SCRUB FLOORS

UNMANAGEABLE HOUSES. LONDON, November 17. Mrs Lucy D. Burnett, of Settrington Rectory, Malton, Yorkshire, wife of the Rev. T. M. Burnett, made a passionate appeal at the Church Assembly yesterday for those clergymen and their wives who are forced to live in huge old-fashioned houses on inadequate incomes. “The house that I live in is enormous.” she said. “If you played a brass band in my kitchen I don’t think that the master and mistress would hear it in the drawing-room. “Wives are being ruined by the hard labour of looking after such houses. What is worse is the case in which the zeal and ardour of an incumbent is quenched when he finds that he has not only to serve tables but to wash floors. Mrs B. E. Moore, of Wragby Vicarage, Lincolnshire, described some clergymen’s homes as “super-parson-ages, but ramshackle old houses.” “Many vicars’ wives have to run a £3,000-a-year house on a. £3OO-a--year income,” she declared. “They often have to do the housework without any servant to help them. T know more than one parson who has to turn to and scrub the kitchen floors when the wife is ill." On the motion of the Bishop of St. Edmundshury and Ipswich, the question was referred to Queen Anne’s Bounty for consideration and report at the earliest possible moment.